"We can end government censorship in a decade," Schmidt said during a speech in Washington. "The solution to government surveillance is to encrypt everything."

Setting aside the entertaining aspect of the source of said statement, I don't think encryption in and of itself is enough. Encryption performed by companies is useless, since we know by now that companies - US or otherwise - are more than eager to bend over backwards to please their governments.

What we need is encryption that we perform ourselves, so that neither governments nor companies are involved. I imagine some sort of box between your home network and the internet, that encrypts and decrypts everything, regardless of source or destination. This box obviously needs to run open source software, otherwise we'd be right back where we started.

So I asked him to fire up his browser, he didn't know what a browser was.

Should have said "button for the internet" instead of browser.

most people just don't understand because they either can't or won't and a number that do give it a go may either encrypt their data and lose access to it or think they have encrypted it and actually haven't done so.

Hard drive encryption and VPNs these days don't require intervention from the user to, so it's really just about having it set up for them as part of the install is good enough for a basic user.